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Jimmy Strobl

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What are the best and worst laws and practices of your region/state/country

Answer as many as you'd like.

Topics: law
+4
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Closing Statement from Jimmy Strobl

Many great thoughts in this conversation, I wish that they still had open-ended Conversations...

I had fun, learned much!

Anyway, It's "impossible" to summarize it, sorry about that.

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  • Andrew Young

    • +2
    Sep 24 2012: I think the USA should get ride of the practice of permanent subsidies. I use the term subsidy loosely as you will see below, but here are just a couple cases I've seen in which the US is giving out the wrong incentives.

    Corn - by subsidizing corn it increases its value, which results in farmers growing more then what is necessary. What do we do with the extra corn, well we turn it into ethanol . There are more efficient and cheaper ways to make ethanol, but we now have an incentive to use corn because there's extra.

    Fuel - With the cost of fuel so cheap people purchased large SUVs and drove everywhere. Current prices are reaching over 4 dollars a gallon, it still doesn't account for the damage to the environment or the cost of keeping the Navy active in the Middle East.

    Electricity - In the state of Washington electricity is held below the market value. This makes it hard for renewable energy to compete because the average household is going to stick with whatever is cheaper and I don't blame them.

    Kids - the US gives a tax break for each additional child you have. I don't think its right for the government to try and limit the number of kids a family has, but there shouldn't be a tax break on your third, forth or fifth kid. It rewards families for growing.

    I don't suggest we cut subsidies off over night, the out come would be disastrous, but we need to start leaning ourselves off of them.

    • Chris Cavalari

      • 0
      Sep 24 2012: Yeah, subsidies are often stupid. How about tobacco? It couldn't possibly get much stupider than that. We pay taxes to smoke it, and they grow more, and it's deadly. Also, because we've insisted on growing so much corn over recent decades, countries that farmed it for centuries before we came into existence, like Mexico, can't grow it on small farms and compete anymore. We grow the corn, and the jobless Mexicans can come cut our grass and carry our Sheetrock up the stairs, so we don't have jobs and they don't have jobs, and we do their jobs and they do our jobs and its a big happy global economy. But it ain't. It isn't a free market. There has never been a true free market in a country or a region ever. Name one.
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      Skye Kelly

      • 0
      Sep 25 2012: I agree with you. The corn subsidies have created all of these unhealthy foods to be cheaper then natural, fresh foods by making corn, corn by products, corn syrup etc the go-to for all of those wonderful fast food restaurants- geeze- a lot of places actually. All the while monsanto is a major benefactor.
      Kids- for sure- about time we give incentives for fewer offspring. (harsh but true I think)
      And then fuels/resources- that is my pet peeve- Europe for years has had a more realistic pricing for energy sources- and guess what- their economies didn't shrink (from that at least- only from poor lending practices they picked up from America) but people became WISER. In general I think these subsidies of "The American Way" are part of our downfall- and we need to relax them and tier them off to become more resilient and aware.

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